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The title is a joke for the world with no barriers between the lachrymose and the gruesome, John Woo's turf. It kicks off with a raid on the stronghold of a Golden Triangle drug lord (Jang Il-shik) by a crew of Chinese mercenaries, it might be the climax except that it's merely an introduction to the cultivation of continuous action. (The Costa-Gavras of Shock Troops is as much a mainstay as Fuller, Aldrich, Peckinpah.) "I got a job to do," growls the commando leader (Eddy Ko), escorting the kingpin to the Thai border is the mission, into the jungle on foot after the jeep conks out. His tiny son is an irritant but resourceful enough to survive a field set ablaze, his buddy (Philippe Loffredo) is a Yank AWOL who meditates in a hut coated with explosives. "I wasn't gonna die if you weren't!" If the Woo aesthetic is still formative here, his brute force is already present in spades. The dastardly Vietnamese officer (Lam Ching-ying) exercises his cruelty on a couple of French tourists ("Remember Dien Bien Phu?"), then gazes through the crosshairs of his rifle just in time to see the grungy savior's incoming bullet. "I can stand to lose an eye... but I can't stand to lose my honor." Kurosawa's bumblers (The Hidden Fortress) are adjusted to the grisly landscape, one (Yuet-Sang Chin) builds his shtick toward a send-up of The Deer Hunter and the other (Chau-Sang Lau) caps his clowning by getting dismembered by enemy spears. Native trackers out of the swamp, cf. Walsh's Distant Drums, the idyll in the inferno, "a gorgeous girl with a machine-gun!" Hung's revision (Eastern Condors) is just over the rise. With Lee Hye-sook, Cécile Le Bailly, and Ma Ying-Chun.
--- Fernando F. Croce |